The last Philosophy Monday was nearly a month ago as I got distracted by the launch of my book in Germany and also current political events. The prior post was on values and today’s post picks up this topic by asking where values should come from. One historic answer has been “from God.” Obviously, unless you have direct conversations with God, this usually means that the values come from a religious tradition in the form of sacred texts and/or some group of religious authority figures (e.g. priests).
The other source of values historically has been philosophy. This is the tradition that I want to continue in this series. One criticism leveled against this is that all philosophy is just a narrative made up by philosophers. Possibly with a strong suspicion of being self-serving, as in the case of male philosophers arguing against women’s right to vote. A lot of philosophical writing has questioned any claim to truth, essentially arguing that all narratives are equally valid. From such relativism it is but a short step to nihilism, rejecting any values or truth claims as baseless.
In an earlier post on “Action” I had described the fundamental question of philosophy as follows: how should we choose our actions in light of our knowledge of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)? Now we have proposed values as the guide to our actions, i.e. values are the answer to this fundamental question. That leads to what I consider to be the fundamental problem of philosophy: identify a firm ground for values that does not rest in the divine and that can not be dismissed as baseless or simply one of many possible grounds.
If such a firm ground exists, then it should be universal. This is not to say that everyone agrees on all the values built upon this ground and certainly not on how to resolve the tradeoffs implied by a set of values for a given decision. But the ground itself should be universal, which means applicable to all humans. Unversality is a logical requirement for a ground to be considered genuinely privileged. I will have more to say about this in the future but for now simply wanted to point out that if it were not so then other grounds would have competing claims.
Bertrand Rusell famously sought to establish this ground through mathematics. This approach wound up running into all sorts of problems, from paradoxes in logic, to problems of infinity in set theory, to Turing’s halting problem and Goedel’s incompleteness theorems. These carry great mysteries within them about the limits to human knowledge. They can take us on utterly fascinating sidequests, some of which I may want to visit as part of Philosophy Mondays. But in other ways they are also overblown because the practical limitations on knowledge that arise from other sources of uncertainty and from the compression of language far outweigh these more theoretical considerations. Put differently, the quest to establish the ground in pure mathematics was doomed from the start even before these problems arose.
Many other scientists and philosophers have provided possible answers in the quest for an objective and universal basis for values. Going back to Hobbes for instance philosophers have sought to ground values in an agreement between rational agents to achieve a stable society. More recently philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have looked to universal human capabilities as such a ground. My own approach, which I have written about in my book The World After Capital and which will be the subject of the next post, has a similar point of departure.
Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.7 based on this post.
